This invention relates generally to the field of computer network and telephone-based user applications and specifically to musical entertainment applications.
Popular music is ubiquitous, intentionally emotional, and commonly used to set the mood for important events in a listener's life. These features of popular music give it the power to evoke strong memories in a listener of events and periods experienced by the listener. Popular music is available from many sources. Listeners can buy music in many digital and analog formats such as Compact Disks (CDs), Moving Picture Experts Group 1 Audio Layer-3 (MP3), and cassette tapes, all of which can be played on small portable devices. Popular music is also readily available from commercial and non-commercial broadcasters who broadcast over a variety of media from radio waves to computer networks. Furthermore, popular music is intentionally designed to create strong emotional feelings in a listener. These strong emotional feelings may help the listener to associate a song with an event stored in the listener's long term memory, particularly if the listener experiences the event while listening to the song. The combination of ubiquity and strong emotional feelings evoked by popular music leads many listeners to purposefully include popular music at events such as weddings and parties. The purposeful combination of popular music and events in a listener's life as well as the ubiquitous nature of popular music creates many opportunities for music and memories to become associated with each other in a listener's mind.
The Internet is quickly becoming a communications medium which is as ubiquitous as popular music in modern cultures. Services such as electronic mail (email) for personal communication and Web servers serving content to Web clients for dissemination of information to large numbers of people have led to a large demand for these and other Internet-based services. This large demand for Internet-based services has pushed more and more content providers to adopt the Internet as the medium of choice whether the content provider is providing broadcasting services or data retrieval services. The large number of content providers is a boon for consumers because each individual consumer can generally find a Web site with content suited to the consumer's individual taste. Furthermore, the interactive component of Internet-based applications allows for ever finer divisions of the consumer marketplace through consumer customization of the delivery of such Internet-based content.
The trend of consumer customization of Internet content is readily apparent in the popular music industry and may ultimately undermine the role of large popular radio stations in establishing a unifying cultural presence. Many music content providers allow listeners to create their own personal “radio station” where the listener is the Disk Jockey (DJ) and the listener determines which songs will be played. One example is the service provided by RadioMoi, literally “my radio,” through its website at www.radiomoi.com. One result of such services is that instead of listeners with a common cultural background listening to a common popular radio station within a geographic area, listeners are able to listen to a large number of competing music sources over many different broadcast and replay media.
Consequently, this lack of a unifying cultural presence in the form of a popular radio station may also be leading to a reduction in the formerly popular pastime of “dedicating” a song to a close acquaintance through a popular radio station. The act of dedicating a song to an acquaintance typically involved the steps of a sender calling the radio station and telling the DJ or his or her staff the name of a song that the sender wants played, the name of the intended recipient of that song, and a short personal message appropriate for retransmission over a publicly licensed broadcast medium. The DJ would in turn play the song and relay the message from the sender to the recipient during the radio station's transmission. The popularity of song dedications is generally considered to lie with a song's ability to evoke memories and emotions as previously described. Therefore, song dedications can be an effective way to convey and share complex emotions and memories when it might not be possible, or desired, for the sender and recipient to communicate directly.